Defining Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is a term that is thrown around a lot when it comes to new and revolutionary technologies. But what exactly does Intelligence mean? Can I say I created something intelligent if it can answer a series of pre-written questions?
Understanding what Intelligence is may not seem necessary, but it was vital in the creation of cognitive science and AI. The original plane design was meant to mimic a bird. If mother nature built it, isn’t it safe to assume that it would be best to just copy from it? Of course, this turned out not to be the case, and the evidence is clear; a bird looks nothing like a plane. During the 1950s, this led to a discussion amongst a series of intellectuals, how do we create Intelligence? As seen with the plane and the bird, mother nature isn’t necessarily the best approach for a given problem, and so scientists tried to create Intelligence without attempting to mimic the human brain. Along the way, they discovered that not only was this an incredibly difficult task, but also human brains are a lot more capable than first expected. Thus, a need for defining what Intelligence is crucial in developing artificial intelligence. Understanding intelligence leads to understanding which approaches to take in order to achieve it.
Intelligence can instead be thought of as a set of tools and characteristics rather than a single defined term. Breaking this down, it can be thought of as the ability to gather information, remember information, and apply information. Of course, these terms are vague in their own sense and have even deeper subsets of definitions, such as theory of mind. Scientists these days working in the field of computational cognitive science don’t typically work with these big problems, but rather break them down into more tangible partitions. Going back to the example of theory of mind, which is defined as the ability to understand other being’s thought and desires, certain AIs and models are built to predict the emotional state of a person based on text or facial expression.
The point of this blog was originally an attempt to create a clear definition of Intelligence, but it becomes clear that it is to vague to actually define. Rather, Intelligence should be looked at as a set of abilities, who’s own abilities can further be broken down into subsets of problems. The truth is, the brain has had millions of years to develop, whereas artificial Intelligence has been around for less than a century. This is where the approach of computational cognitive science is helping catch us up to the levels of the brain. Researches break down Intelligence into simple problems, apply them to an AI, and try to understand what the model that comes out means. But cognitive science is an interdisciplinary study, and so there are multiple approaches from different fields to the same problem. Neurobiologists attempt to understand how the brain performs intelligent tasks and map the flow of blood to isolate and dissect regions of the brain to understand from that perspective.
The many approaches to the same problem can eventually lead to a working model of the brain as artificial intelligence, but for now, that day is still a long way from today.
